Tag Archives: Farming

If the cuts go through as envisioned by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Welch said, many families who are now eligible for food assistance would be kicked off, and would no longer be eligible for programs such as the summer food programs run in Brattleboro.

This may come as a surprise to some, but the farm bill should really be called the food stamp bill. Food stamps account for about 70 percent of farm bill costs. The Senate farm bill doesn’t do anything to reform food stamps. It doesn’t reduce dependency on welfare assistance.

The prospect of a new dairy processing plant in Windham County is good news for dairy farmers around Vermont, said Diane Bothfeld, the director of administrative services and dairy policy for the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets.

“By subsidizing crops, subsidizing the insurance of these crops, we end up with surpluses of one commodity at the expense of a shortage of other crops that should have and could have and would have been planted but weren’t because government masked the signals that market consumers were sending to those producers.”

During President Barack Obama’s tenure, the so-called “Waters of the United States” rule had been strictly defined to apply to “navigable waterways” but interpreted to mean that even ditches or potholes with water in them could be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. This was a huge overreach.